Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh says good judges are like good referees.
“Am I calling it the same way for labor and management, for the business and the environmental interests, for the Republican and the Democrat?” he asked at a judicial conference over the summer. “If you can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘I would do the exact same thing if the parties were flipped,’ then you’re not being a good judge, just like you wouldn’t be a good referee if you were favoring one team over the other.”
A look at the court’s record in emergency rulings does not appear to reflect Justice Kavanaugh’s goal.
This is apparent in the overall numbers, with the Trump administration prevailing much more often than its predecessor had — 84 percent of the time, compared with 53 percent for the Biden administration. That is perhaps unsurprising, given that the court is dominated by six Republican appointees.
Drilling down to individual justices’ votes rounds out the group portrait.
In the 17 cases in which the Biden administration sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court over four years, for instance, Justice Kavanaugh voted in its favor 41 percent of the time, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.
By contrast, in the 19 cases in which the court has ruled on applications from the second Trump administration, Justice Kavanaugh voted for the administration 89 percent of the time. That amounted to a 48 percentage-point gap in favor of President Trump.
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The post On the Supreme Court’s Emergency Docket, Sharp Partisan Divides appeared first on New York Times.
